Which principle exactly? Early motif UIs still are in use in a lot of nieche applications.
Not saying UI design is easy or FOSS apps shine with excellent GUIs, but they work for their users and complaining doesn’t help.
My point is: Either improve the UI or pay someone to improve it. Or at least make a suggestion to the devs but don’t blame linux people for not providing a free product perfectly adapted to your personal habits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy
I assumed this is what you were referring to.
I was talking about all *nix-typical principles. e.g. that everything should integrate into batched jobs. Modularity. Human readable error messages. Transparent logging. Integrated software repositories & version control, man pages. file permissions & user groups. etc.
Stuff that seems strange and unnecessary complex for new users, who don’t know how to use stuff.